Sand patterns

It’s a bit challenging to make sense of this belated comment, but I’ll try my best:

        

[brownmamba] To say this blog post is provocative is an understatement. I don't expect to get a reply but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. I'm glad that you provided at least a very cursory account of your view on morality, which seems to be derived from St. Thomas Aquinas: "Divine command theory can be grounded in the created nature of things. Social obligations keyed to the specific nature God gave us".

Unfortunately, Aquinas had a bad habit of swiping all my best ideas without giving me credit.

 The question that immediately arises is "Why did God create nature the way He did ?". The problem is that there is no value independent of desires.

Well, that’s a big fat assertion. Why should we grant the contention that there is no value independent of desire? What does that even mean (assuming it means anything)?

For instance, duties can be opposed to desires. I may have an obligation to do something despite my aversion to doing it. A duty is a type of value. But I don’t know how the commenter is defining “value.”

Since this is the case…

Except that he hasn’t established that this is the case. He hasn’t offered a supporting argument for his contention. So he can’t very well build on that contention, as if that’s a given.

…there are no "objective reasons" for God creating nature one way or another.

Since a different nature is objectively different, that could well give God a differential reason for preferring one alternative over another. Different possible worlds contain different global narratives. So God could reasonably prefer one world story over another. 

Thus, it follows…

Except that it doesn’t follow–as I just explained.

…that any nature God created is ultimately arbitrary.

How does saying God could create nature one way or the other made nature ultimately arbitrary? Take a novelist. There’s more than one way he can tell a similar story. He can add a character or subtract a character. He can change a character by changing its experience. He can change how the story ends.

How is that arbitrary? All these differences can be good differences. Or some differences can be improvements. Some adjustments are better than others.

 This doesn't seem to lead to a world any more meaningful than one resulting from blind causes.

That’s vague. Why assume that a world resulting from blind causes is meaningful at all?

And certainly a world resulting from a higher intelligence can be meaningful (not to mention, more meaningful) than a world resulting from blind causes.

It’s like the difference between “accidental art” (an oxymoron) and a Da Vinci painting.

Likewise, you can have variations on the same basic painting. For instance, Da Vinci painted two different versions of the Virgin of the Rocks. Both versions are meaningful. And the variations are meaningful.

 Secondly, the imagery of a "doll-world" is quite powerful, yet it remains to be explained how a world created by God would be any less doll-like. I'm not certain what your on

Funeral for atheism

There’s a fundamental difference between a “doll” that’s designed by a higher intelligence, and a doll that’s the byproduct of a blind process. One doll exemplifies the intelligence of its maker, whereas the other doll is like fortuitous patterns in the sand.